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That wasn't the point of the exercise. But since you brought up NAFTA in conjunction with 'Sanders on factories closing,' it's edifying to know that whenever a factory closes - people lose jobs.
The 'smearing' is whole cloth on your part.
In the link you provided, you stated your position on TPP was lukewarm, like Krugman's. But Krugman stated he was a lukewarm opponent in June,2015. http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/06/13/decline-and-fall-of-the-davos-democrats/
I wonder if his view has evolved since more facts have come to light since then.
Hillary Clinton doesn’t get it: Paul Krugman, Bernie Sanders and the truth about the free trade scam
Trade has been a disaster for Democratic voters, but a boon for Democratic politicians -- especially the Clintons
Paul Rosenberg Friday, Mar 18, 2016 02:13 PM EST
In the wake of Bernie Sanders stunning upset victory in the Michigan primary, there’s a renewed recognition that the negative impacts of global trade matter—a lot. There’s still a broad assumption Clinton will easily win the nomination, but there’s been some talk that she might consider Sherrod Brown, Ohio’s staunchly anti-”free trade” senator as her running mate. And of course, as the New York Times dwells on, Clinton is “sharpening” her “message on jobs and trade.”
But Michigan matters not just for Clinton, but for the Democratic Party as a whole. And it’s going to take much more than sharper messaging to actually make a difference in people’s lives. It’s not just a matter of changing policies around the edges—as Clinton now says that she wants to do—the entire corporate-dominated policymaking process that produces such deals needs to be done away with, and replaced with something far more open, democratic and informed by long-term realism. And that can only happen through a mobilization of political will—or as Sanders would call it, “a political revolution.”
Clinton’s messaging shift is a good indication of how far the establishment is from grasping what’s actually needed. As the Times notes, she’s always been upbeat in the past, stressing “inclusiveness,” as the neoliberal lexicon would have it:
“I want to be the president for the struggling, the striving and the successful,” she often said.
But now, she’s signaled a change:
Stung by the bad showing, Mrs. Clinton was already recalibrating her message, even altering her standard line before the Michigan race had been called. “I don’t want to be the president for those who are already successful — they don’t need me,” she said at a rally Tuesday night in Cleveland. “I want to be the president for the struggling and the striving.”
It’s a characteristically breathtaking move on Clinton’s part. It sounds great, of course. But how can she be a president for the struggling and striving when she’s so out of touch with them that she’s been blindsided by the brokenness of their dreams? There’s so much more than messaging that needs to be adjusted here. As Paul Krugman now admits, “much of the elite defense of globalization is basically dishonest…. So the elite case for ever-freer trade is largely a scam.”
Just as Clinton, the candidate, was so disconnected from public anger, and the objective suffering it springs from, the entire policy apparatus around trade has for years been totally disconnected from virtually anyone outside of the corporate sector.
That might sound hyperbolic, but it’s quite literally true. Last year, when an early Senate vote on the Trans Pacific Partnership was about to be held, the Intercept explained that “Even members of Congress can only look at it one section at a time in the Capitol’s basement, without most of their staff or the ability to keep notes.” Hence, the only way the public knew what was in the TPP ahead of time was through Wikileaks. Things were different for our corporate overlords, however:
But there’s an exception: if you’re part of one of 28 U.S. government-appointed trade advisory committees providing advice to the U.S. negotiators. The committees with the most access to what’s going on in the negotiations are 16 “Industry Trade Advisory Committees,” whose members include AT&T, General Electric, Apple, Dow Chemical, Nike, Walmart and the American Petroleum Institute.
As an illustration of how this works, the Intercept noted:
[T]he Energy and Energy Services committee includes the National Mining Association and America’s Natural Gas Alliance but only one representative from a company dedicated to less-polluting wind and solar energy.
The fundamental problem here is not the trade deals themselves—horrendous as they may be (more on that below)—but the super-secretive policy apparatus that produces them, the norms by which it functions, and the comfortable cluelessness with which it’s accepted as perfectly normal, if not axiomatically unquestionable, by our governing elites—both here in America and around the world. It’s all done in the name of “free trade,” of course, but the corporate-dominated reality just described is closer in spirit to the mercantilism of the pre-Adam Smith era..
To see just how ludicrous the “free trade” label is, consider the beginning of this brief post from economist Dean Baker, writing at the world’s oldest blog:
Hey, can an experienced doctor from Germany show up and start practicing in New York next week? Since the answer is no, we can say that we don’t have free trade.
Protectionism is the rule when it comes to high-income professions, as Baker has been pointing out for years. In fact, it’s gotten stronger. And not just for professions, of course:
We also have strengthened patent and copyright protections, making drugs and other affected items far more expensive. These protections are also forms of protectionism.
The thing is “free trade” sounds so good … so free! It’s definitely good messaging. No? Well, not if you’re trying to think straight, in an effort to design policies that actually work. And that’s the real challenge that Democrats face—whichever candidate’s side they are on just now. Because the problem’s not going to go away any time soon. That problem is much harder for Clinton precisely because she’s so deeply wedded to the system as it currently exists. Even if she genuinely wanted to start fixing things, how could she possibly proceed? But given the sorry state of Democratic Party as a whole, it’s going to be very challenging for Sanders as well.
After Sanders’ upset win in Michigan, there were a number of predictable responses, portraying Sanders’ views as simplistic—much like Donald Trump’s, get it?—such as this from Washington Monthly‘s blog, pointing out that Michigan’s industrial decline started well before NAFTA—as anyone who’s seen “Roger and Me” knows very well. But this kind of analysis, though historically well founded, is nonetheless off-base: The real-world challenge is not uprooting historic wrongs, but struggling against current wrongs and preventing future ones. NAFTA still matters because the damage it’s done is still ongoing, it’s been replicated, and the mechanisms driving it have spread, not because anyone thinks it’s the sole source of problems in Michigan or anywhere else.
In late 2013, just before NAFTA turned 20, Jeff Faux, founder of the Economic Policy Institute, wrote an assesment of what NAFTA had meant. He called it “A Template for Neoliberal Globalization,” and highlighted four main ways it had impacted American workers:
First, it caused the loss of some 700,000 jobs as companies moved their production to Mexico, where labor was cheaper….
Second, NAFTA strengthened the ability of U.S. employers to force workers to accept lower wages and benefits….
Third, NAFTA drove several million Mexican workers and their families out of the agriculture and small business sectors, which could not compete with the flood of products—often subsidized—from U.S. producers. This dislocation was a major cause of the dramatic increase of undocumented workers in the United States….
Fourth, and ultimately most importantly, NAFTA created a template for the rules of the emerging global economy, in which the benefits would flow to capital and the costs to labor. Among other things, NAFTA granted corporations extraordinary protections against national labor laws that might threaten profits, set up special courts—chosen from rosters of pro-business experts—to judge corporate suits against governments, and at the same time effectively denied legal status to workers and unions to defend themselves in these new cross-border jurisdictions.
Although all four of these impacts were devastating, the last one is what’s most important going forward. It’s what’s animating the TPP process and every other trade agreement in the works. So long as trade rules are written by the corporations, for the corporations, the rights, the dignity and the self-determination of the American people are all fundamentally threatened.
In fact, a surprising range of Obama’s political legacy will be put at risk if the TPP is approved—as explained by Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch division just before Obama’s last State of the Union.
It threatened President Obama’s legacy on the climate change and the environment:
The environmental groups that have celebrated Obama’s achievements with the global climate treaty and his decision to the stop the XL Pipeline call the TPP an act of “climate denial.” …. Environmental groups listed on the White House website as supporting the deal, including NRDC and Defenders of Wildlife, in fact came out in opposition after seeing the final text.
It threatened President Obama’s legacy of reducing healthcare costs:
The TPP would directly contradict Obama efforts to reduce U.S. healthcare costs by expanding monopoly patent protections for big drug firms, as Doctors Without Borders notes. This allows drug firms to stop competition and raise medicine prices.
It threatened President Obama’s legacy of rescuing the American Auto industry:
The TPP would threaten the president’s successful rescue of the U.S. auto industry and thousands of U.S. jobs. It would allow vehicles comprised mainly of Chinese and other non-TPP country parts and labor to gain duty free access…. Ford has supported all past U.S. trade deals, but opposes the TPP.
It threatened President Obama’s legacy of expanding gay rights:
[I]t decided to allow Brunei to remain in the TPP even after the country announced that it would begin stoning to death gays and single mothers under new sharia-based laws. This has led to LGBTQ groups joining the TPP opposition.
It threatened President Obama’s legacy of financial reform:
The TPP could help banks unravel the new rules Obama achieved on Wall Street by prohibiting bans on risky financial products and “too big to fail” safeguards while empowering foreign banks to “sue” the U.S. government over new financial regulations.
Why would President Obama put so much of his legacy at risk? The simple answer is, we don’t know. Perhaps he doesn’t think the threats are real—unlike those who are most directly endangered by the risks. If the TPP process were open and democratic, there would have been an opportunity to dialog, and at the very least gain some understanding of Obama’s thinking. At most, his thinking could have been fundamentally changed. But neither possibility existed in the secretive backroom process that’s been normalized under neoliberalism’s rules. And that’s what’s got to end.
This profound disconnect gets to the very heart of what America’s trade problems are all about—a fundamental lack of democratic governance over a realm of law and policy that increasingly shapes the landscapes of our daily lives as the world grows ever smaller, ever more interconnected.
It’s not just Obama, of course. Most of the Democratic Party establishment seems to accept this situation, even if they may not go along with any one particular trade deal. Hillary Clinton now says that she opposes the TPP, whereas she previously referred to it as “the gold standard.” What’s changed? Who knows? No one, apparently, has asked her. But she clearly didn’t have a problem with the process, or she would have objected to it long ago—just as Bernie Sanders did.
Clinton tries to spin her late decision as more thoughtful, more nuanced, more deliberative. But given that the process itself is so profoundly flawed—secretive, anti-democratic, dominated by corporate special interests—there’s every reason to see Sanders’ position as being both more principled and more thoughtful, more penetrating in terms of grasping what the real issues and problems are.
One further point needs to be added here. In describing why elite defenses of globalization were a scam, Krugman noted:
[T]he conventional case for trade liberalization relies on the assertion that the government could redistribute income to ensure that everyone wins — but we now have an ideology utterly opposed to such redistribution in full control of one party, and with blocking power against anything but a minor move in that direction by the other.
In short, you need Bernie Sanders-style democratic socialism in order for honest pro-globalization arguments to work!
This is not just a primary campaign question between these two candidates. The entire Democratic Party needs to fundamentally rethink what its trade policy should be. As it now stands, the party simply accepts that trade agreements are written secretly behind closed doors by government officials from different countries consulting with lawyers and lobbyists from (mostly transnational) large corporations. The interests of the American public in general (or any other public around the world) simply don’t enter into the process. There are no labor, environmental, public health or consumer advocates involved. It’s understandable why the GOP might like such a system. It’s beyond belief that the Democratic Party has never even seriously questioned it. The time to start questioning it—seriously—has finally arrived. And the time for action is next.
http://www.salon.com/2016/03/18/hillary_clinton_doesnt_get_it_paul_krugman_bernie_sanders_and_the_truth_about_the_free_trade_scam/
Could it be that Allison Schrager is just a reporter who had a glitzy heading that fit so snugly into your 'pro tpp' prejudice?
What a great time to be alive!
Rory McIllory...
missed the morning crowd, thanks for the wu
The DNC nominee was a matter of 'Hide Hillary' allied with superdelegates to control the outcome.
Democracy only works when the votes of the people—not the decision of a small number of elites—are what determines the outcome of elections.
http://pac.petitions.moveon.org/sign/tell-the-democratic-superdel
Clinton leads 467-26 among superdelegates, who are Democratic elected officials and other party insiders allowed to support whichever candidate they like.
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/superdelegates-might-not-save-hillary-clinton/
Bernie Sanders May Not Prevail, But His Revolution Is Just Getting Started
http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2016-03-17/bernie-sanders-may-not-prevail-but-his-revolution-is-just-getting-started
The Vermont senator won’t be the Democratic nominee, but his supporters will shape the party.
I'm with you on MSU. Izzo has a great backcourt and HOF motivation.
I think you've got to pick coaches this year...
unresponsive...(eom)
Blah,blah, blah -- F6 My point/question stands. -- why does a corporate lobbyist get a super-delegate vote?
Okie Doke... (eom)
I don't pretend to have your boundless knowledge of election process, but before you go off like the little rascals on me, what's a super-delegate really worth? 10k... 30k popular votes?... is it worth more than a nontransferable, common delegate?
Oh.. here we go again.
Splain me, mr. luminary - that parties are not Democratic
Is a super-delegate a representative of the democratic party?
In One Tweet, Howard Dean Reveals Why Superdelegates Should be Abolished
http://usuncut.com/politics/howard-dean-superdelegates-tweet/
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2016/3/5/1496793/-Superdelegate-and-Former-Vermont-Governor-Howard-Dean-Does-not-make-a-great-case-for-Superdelegates
When confronted about his endorsement of Hillary Clinton despite the fact that his home state voted overwhelmingly for her opponent, this is how Howard Dean responded:
Howard Dean ?@GovHowardDean
Super delegates don't "represent people" I'm not elected by anyone. I'll do what I think is right for the country
3:48 PM - 5 Mar 2016
---------------
If I remember correctly, this guy was THE rebel of the 2004 primary, he got a consolation prize as chairman of the DNC, they gave him some corporate lobby money and the next thing you know, they had him right where they wanted... and just like Jimmy Dore has said (I'm paraphrasing here):
Keeping up with Elizabeth Warren...
One-on-One With Sen. Elizabeth Warren on 2016 Race, SCOTUS Nominees
Democrats should take charge and unite against Donald Trump, she says
By Alison King
http://www.necn.com/news/politics/NECN-EXCLUSIVE-One-on-One-With-Sen-Elizabeth-Warren-on-2016-Race-SCOTUS-Nominees-371935192.html
Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren has not had a lot to say about the 2016 presidential race - until now. (Published Sunday, March 13, 2016)
Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren says it's still "way, way, way premature" to consider a vice presidential bid and she doesn't "have a timeline" on when she'll make a presidential endorsement.
Known as one of the boldest voices in the U.S. Senate, Warren has been uncharacteristically silent when it comes to the 2016 race for the White House. The senator, however, is showing signs she may soon be playing a greater role in the election.
Necn's Alison King sat down with the Bay State's senior senator at a restaurant in Roxbury, where she opened up about the race, and blasted front-runner Donald Trump, but only after voicing her outrage at Senate Republicans for refusing to consider any of President Obama's Supreme Court nominees.
"That is extremism. And it is the kind of extremism that has nursed and nurtured Donald Trump and Ted Cruz," Warren said of the GOP contenders.
FULL INTERVIEW: 1-on-1 With Sen. Warren
[NECN] FULL INTERVIEW: 1-on-1 With Sen. Warren
Alison King's full interview with Mass. Sen. Elizabeth Warren. (Published Monday, March 14, 2016)
She said the melee that erupted Friday at a canceled Trump rally in Chicago — leading to four arrests — "is on Trump" and that the Republican front-runner "has been fostering and fomenting" such behavior for months.
"It finally reached the next level. I think people are worried about what it means. We're in a new space and we're trying to figure out, how do we describe this?" she explained.
Warren later added, "I am not happy to see Donald Trump even threatening to get anywhere near the presidency. Don't take me there. That is a form of extremism. He advocates a form of ugliness that I don't want any part of."
She blasted 2012 presidential candidate Mitt Romney, who denounced Trump last week and announced plans to campaign with GOP contender John Kasich in Ohio.
"Where was Mitt Romney for the last eight years?" she said. "I'm sorry, where was Mitt Romney since he ran for president?"
The senator also said Democrats should take charge and unite against Trump.
"You know, I think we need to get up and we need to stand strong. We need to speak from the heart and speak loudly," she said, adding that she does plan to endorse a candidate but doesn't "have a timeline on it."
When asked what it would mean to elect Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton, described by King as being "extremely divisive," Warren said it's important to focus on politics rather than people.
"You know, my view on this is we've got to make this fundamentally about the issues. It's not about our differences. It's not about who's liked and who isn't. It's about the things that we need our government to do," she explained.
She echoed that sentiment when asked in reference to Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders whether the electorate is "ready to possibly vote for a Jewish candidate," saying, "I think we are ready for having somebody who is going to fight on our side."
Warren said she loves her job in the Senate, adding that it's "way, way, way premature" to wonder whether she would consider running as vice president. But with her comments she did not categorically rule it out.
Blowing the Biggest Political Story of the Last 50 Years
Posted on Mar 12, 2016
By Neal Gabler / Moyers & Company
This piece first appeared at Moyers & Company.
Ah, the crescendo of complaint! The Republican establishment and the mainstream media, working hand in hand in their unprecedented, non-stop assault on the “short-fingered vulgarian” named Donald Trump, would have you believe that Trump augurs the destruction of the Republican Party. Former Reagan speechwriter and now Wall Street Journal/CBS pundit Peggy Noonan expressed the general sentiment of both camps when she said on Super Tuesday that “we’re seeing a great political party shatter before our eyes.”
But here is what no one in the GOP establishment wants you to know, and no one in the media wants to admit: Donald Trump isn’t the destruction of the Republican Party; he is the fulfillment of everything the party has been saying and doing for decades. He is just saying it louder and more plainly than his predecessors and intra-party rivals.
The media have been acting as if the Trump debacle were the biggest political story to come down the pike in some time. But the real story – one the popularity of Trump’s candidacy has revealed and inarguably the biggest political story of the last 50 years — is the decades-long transformation of Republicanism from a business-centered, small town, white Protestant set of beliefs into quite possibly America’s primary institutional force of bigotry, intellectual dishonesty, ignorance, warmongering, intractability and cruelty against the vulnerable and powerless.
It is a story you didn’t read, hear or see in the mainstream media, only in lefty journals like The Nation and Rolling Stone, on websites like People for the American Way, and in columns like Paul Krugman’s. And it wasn’t exactly because the MSM in its myopia missed the story. It was because they chose not to tell it – to pretend it wasn’t happening. They are still pretending.
It is hardly a surprise that the GOP establishment and their enablers in the media are acting as if Trump, the Republican frontrunner, is a break from the party’s supposedly genteel past. Like Captain Renault in Casablanca, who was “shocked, shocked,” to find gambling in Rick’s establishment, the GOP solons profess to be “shocked, shocked” by Trump’s demagogic racism and nativism. Their protestations remind me of an old gambit of comedian Milton Berle. When the audience was applauding him, he would shush them demonstratively with one hand while encouraging them gently with the other.
Neither is it a surprise that the conservative media have been doing the same thing — decrying Trump while giving us Trump Lite. Indeed, even less blatant partisans who ought to know better, like every “thinking man’s” favorite conservative David Brooks, deliver the same hypocrisy.
No, Brooks isn’t too keen on Trump (or Cruz for that matter), but he is very keen on some mythological Republican Party that exudes decency. On the PBS NewsHour last week he said with great earnestness, “For almost a century-and-a-half, the Republican Party has stood for a certain free market version of America – an America that’s about openness, that’s about markets and opportunity, and a definition of what this country is.”
Free markets? That’s what he thinks defines America? Let me rephrase what I said earlier: Trump hasn’t just fulfilled the Republican Party’s purpose; he has exposed it. And he also has exposed the media’s indifference to what the party has become.
Obviously, I am not saying that the transmogrification of the Republican Party happened surreptitiously. It happened in plain sight, and it was extensively chronicled — but not by the MSM. The sainted Reagan blew his party’s cover when to kick off his general election campaign in 1980 he spoke at the Neshoba County Fair, just outside Philadelphia, Mississippi, where three civil rights workers had been brutally murdered in 1964. He wasn’t there to demonstrate his sympathy to the civil rights movement, but to demonstrate his sympathy to those who opposed it. This was an ugly moment, and it didn’t go entirely unnoticed in the media. In fact, David Brooks would later be moved to defend the speech, which invoked the not-so-subtle buzz words “states’ rights,” and to act as if Reagan had been slandered by those who called him out on it.
But if some in the media did call out Reagan on his disgusting curtsy to George Wallace voters, the press seemed to lose its nerve once Reagan became president and the Republican Party lurched not just rightward, but extremist-ward. Do you remember these headlines: “Republicans Oppose Civil Rights”; “Republicans Work to Defeat Expansion of Health Insurance”; “Republicans Torpedo Extension of Unemployment Benefits”; “Republicans Demonize Homosexuals and Deny Them Rights”; “Republicans Call Climate Change a Hoax and Refuse to Stop Greenhouse Gases”? No, you don’t remember, because no MSM paper printed them and no MSM network broadcast them. Instead, the media behaved as if extremism were business as usual.
I don’t think the media would deny their indifference. They would say they don’t take sides. They’re neutral. They just report. Partisanship is for Fox News and MSNBC.
Of course, this is utter nonsense. Accurate reporting means taking sides when one side is spouting falsehoods. I am still waiting for the media to correct the GOP pronouncements that Obamacare has cost us jobs and sent health care costs skyrocketing – both of which are screamingly false. I am not holding my breath.
But even if it were true that the media are not referees, not taking sides against extremism is just another way of taking sides by legitimizing extremism and making it the new normal, which it now is – so long, apparently, as you don’t shout it. In any case, objectivity is a rationalization. We know the media are afraid of a right-wing backlash. We know that they protect themselves by insisting that our two major parties are equidistant from the political center – more nonsense. And we know that every story is framed by its political consequences, not its human ones. We see that every day.
But if you really want to know why the media skipped the story about Republican extremism all these years, you have to look to the force of extremism itself and the way it reconfigures the political spectrum, basically disorienting us. In Europe, fringe parties on the right and left get savaged by the press all the time. If we had them here, no doubt the same thing would happen, press objectivity notwithstanding. The difference between Europe and America is that our right-wing extremists happen to control one of our two major parties and theirs don’t. To take on extremism would reveal not only the Republicans’ deficiencies, both of its elected officials and its rank and file, but the deficiencies of the entire American political system. That takes a courage very, very few people (OK, nobody) in the MSM have.
And yet we now know that the media can be assertive if they want to be, that they can take sides, and even correct the record if they choose. We know because that is precisely what they are doing against Trump, but only because they see Trump as an outlier from the GOP establishment – a disruptive, fringe force. Trump has a right to feel blindsided by the double standard to which he is being subjected. Cruz may be even more of an outlier from the American mainstream than Trump, and yet the media don’t seem anywhere near as lathered about him.
But back to the big story: Something happened in American politics over the last 25 or 30 years to release our demons and remove our shame. The media didn’t want to look. Now Trump has come along to reap what the conservatives had sown, and stir up those demons, and the media are suddenly in high dudgeon. Where were they when America needed them?
Neal Gabler is an author of five books and the recipient of two LA Times Book Prizes, Time magazine’s non-fiction book of the year, USA Today’s biography of the year and other awards. He is also a senior fellow at the Lear Center for the Study of Entertainment and Society and is currently writing a biography of Sen. Edward Kennedy.
http://www.truthdig.com/report/page2/blowing_the_biggest_political_story_of_the_last_fifty_years_20160312
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I could have highlighted various lines and paragraphs but didn't. If you read read to here, you know what I mean... great rant!
You're right, Stephanie. I misspoke. I should have said that a majority of Americans don't want the trade deal. I also agree with your other talking points. In my opinion, as people become more aware of the true nature of this agreement, their numbers will be more inline with their reps.
(from the WSJ)
Free Trade Loses Political Favor
Republican backing fades as voters voice surprising skepticism; Pacific pact seen at risk
After decades in which successive Republican and Democratic presidents have pushed to open U.S. and global markets, resentment toward free trade now appears to have the upper hand in both parties, making passage this year of a sweeping Pacific trade deal far less likely and clouding the longer-term outlook for international economic exchange.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/free-trade-loses-political-favor-1457571366
The majority of democrats do not want the TPP trade deal. Bernie, Hillary and yes, the republican front-runner are all opposed to the TPP.
So, with less than a year to go, why would Obama push forward something a future president doesn't want. A good debate question would be, how do you feel about a president opposing his own party and the 2 candidates who don't want the TPP?
We know that Sanders has called out Obama on this trade deal, Clinton... not so much.
Democratic Town Hall: A reality check
CNN team ranks claims as true, mostly true, false or it's complicated
Published 8:54 PM PDT Mar 13, 2016
WASHINGTON (CNN) —Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton met at The Ohio State University on Sunday for a Democratic town hall hosted by CNN and TV One, and CNN's Reality Check team spent the night putting their statements and assertions to the test.
The team of reporters, researchers and editors across CNN listened throughout the town hall, selected key statements and then rated them true; mostly true; true, but misleading; false; or it's complicated.
Bernie Sanders
Reality Check: Sanders on factories closing
By Tami Luhby, CNNMoney
In talking about trade, Sanders decried the agreements that he said have hurt the nation's manufacturing sector.
"We have lost, since 2001, almost 60,000 factories. Can you imagine that? Sixty-thousand factories, millions of good-paying jobs," he said.
He's right.
There were 352,600 manufacturing establishments employing just under 16 million people in 2001, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. By 2013, that figure was down to 292,100 establishments, employing 11.3 million people.
Verdict: True.
Reality Check: Sanders on America's prison population
By Kate Grise, CNN
Sanders told the audience that there are "more people in jail in America than any other country on Earth."
According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, there were more than 2.2 million adults held in local jails and prisons in the United States in 2014.
The Chinese have 1.66 million people locked up in their prison system, while the Russian prison population doesn't hit a million, with about 644,000 people incarcerated, according to the Institute for Criminal Policy Research.
However, the institute notes that China's incarcerated population is probably higher since that number does not include people held in detention centers. In 2009, an additional 650,000 people were held in detention centers, according to numbers reported by Chinese government officials.
Just based on those raw numbers, we rate Bernie Sanders' claim as true.
However, many experts say it is best to compare the prison population rate of countries.
By this measure, the United States locks up 698 per 100,000 people, which puts it at second, according to the ICPR.
Only the island nation of Seychelles tops the United States, with 799 prisoners per 100,000 people. However, some incarceration experts say that it is unfair to compare Seychelles, which has a population of about 90,000, to the United States, a country with more than 300 million people. The Prison Policy Initiative did not include countries with less than half a million residents when it published its 2014 States of Incarceration report "to make the comparisons more meaningful."
China's rate is 119 prisoners per 100,000 people and Russia's is 446 per 100,000.
Even when looking at the numbers from a different perspective, we still rate Sanders' claim as true.
Reality Check: Sanders on wealth inequality in the U.S.
By Tami Luhby, CNNMoney
Sanders ticked off a list showing how unequal America is.
One of them centered on wealth: "Problem is that we have the worst distribution of wealth of any major country on Earth," Sanders said.
Financial services Credit Suisse and Allianz look at wealth globally every year. They both found that the United States has the highest level of inequality among developed countries. Noting that the economic crisis of the last decade and the subsequent sluggish recovery has exacerbated the divide, Allianz dubbed us the "Unequal States of America."
The richest 10 percent of Americans controlled 74.6 percent of the nation's wealth in 2014, according to Credit Suisse. The only other developed nation that comes close is Switzerland, where the top 10 percent own 71.9 percent of the wealth.
Wealth inequality in the U.S. rivals that of several emerging countries, such as Russia, South Africa and India.
Verdict: True.
Hillary Clinton
Reality Check: Clinton on Iran's nuclear program
By Ryan Browne, CNN
When Clinton was asked whether her record in office was overly interventionist, she referenced her role in helping lay the foundations for the international effort to curb Iran's nuclear program. She described the Iranian nuclear program as being highly advanced when President Barack Obama took office.
Clinton said, "You know, when President Obama went into office and I became secretary of state, the Iranians had mastered the nuclear fuel cycle. They had built covert facilities, they had stocked them with centrifuges. All of that happened while George W. Bush was president, and we had done, you know, sanctions and everything that we could think of as the United States government and Congress, but it hadn't stopped them. And there were a lot of other countries in the region who said they would take military action if necessary."
Iran's nuclear program dates all the way back to the 1980s. In 1996, President Bill Clinton signed off on sanctions against Iran to penalize it for pursuing a nuclear program. But the Iranian government did not announce it had mastered the nuclear fuel cycle until the end of 2010, nearly two years into Hillary Clinton's tenure as secretary of state.
Iran now produces everything it needs for the nuclear fuel cycle, making its nuclear program self-sufficient, the head of the country's Atomic Energy Organization told state media Sunday.
While Iran's nuclear program made great strides during the Bush presidency, the fuel cycle was mastered during the early years of the Obama administration, and Iran's use of covert facilities dates all the way back to the 1990s.
Clinton's statement that these developments occurred while Bush was in office is false.
Reality Check: Clinton on her role in the Iran nuclear deal
By Laura Koran, CNN
Clinton took credit for bringing Iran to the negotiating table for a deal that would restrict its nuclear program.
Clinton conceded that some sanctions on Iran were imposed under George W. Bush's administration, but went on to suggest that these did nothing to slow Iran's weapons-related nuclear activities.
"So I led the effort to impose sanctions on Iran, to really bring them to the negotiating table," said Clinton, adding, "the negotiations started under my watch."
Talks did in fact begin during Clinton's tenure leading the State Department, and she did play an important role galvanizing international support for tougher sanctions, but Clinton's statements Sunday minimize significant contributions by both Congress and the Bush administration.
In her 2014 memoir "Hard Choices," Clinton wrote about how negotiations emerged from back-channel discussions through the sultan of Oman, who ultimately suggested the talks. Clinton later sent a top aide to Oman to meet with the Iranians, paving the way for a critical phone call between President Barack Obama and Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, and the commencement of more formal negotiations.
Clinton also argued successfully for harsher U.S. and United Nations Security Council sanctions that increased the pressure on Iran's economy in the months leading up to negotiations.
In particular, Clinton lobbied foreign powers to sign onto nuclear-related sanctions in early 2010, helping build unity between the U.S., Britain, France, Germany, Russia, and China behind the measures.
Congress also imposed new unilateral sanctions against Iran around that time, but in some cases, those measures actually went further than the Obama administration wanted to go, and were in fact publicly opposed by State Department officials.
Clinton's statements Sunday also undervalue the usefulness of measures taken by the Bush administration, led by then-Undersecretary of Treasury for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence Stuart Levey.
In fact, in the last three years of the Bush administration, the United Nations Security Council imposed several rounds of tough international sanctions against Iran in connection with the country's nuclear activity. It's possible these sanctions, in addition to the ones Clinton promoted, affected Iran's calculus in deciding to pursue diplomatic talks.
Verdict: Mostly true. Clinton played a major role in bringing about the Iran talks, but those initiatives were bolstered by congressional action -- some of which her department opposed -- and by Bush-era measures.
Reality Check: Clinton on poverty
By Tami Luhby, CNNMoney
In talking about fighting poverty, Clinton pointed out that poverty fell drastically during the administration of her husband, Bill Clinton.
"In the '90s, more people were lifted out of poverty at any time in recent history because of the terrible economic policies of the Bush administration. President Obama was left with the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, and people fell back into poverty because they lost jobs, they lost homes, they lost opportunities and hope," she said.
Poverty did rise under the first Bush administration. In 1989, George H.W. Bush's first year in office, there were 31.5 million people in poverty, or 12.8 percent of Americans.
It rose to 39.3 million, or 15.1 percent, by 1993, when Bill Clinton entered the White House. In 2000, his last full year in office, it had dropped to 31.6 million people, or 11.3 percent of Americans, the lowest rate since 1974.
Poverty jumped again to 39.8 million people, or 13.2 percent, by 2008, when George W. Bush was leaving office.
The Great Recession sent millions more Americans into poverty. The rate hit 15.1 percent in 2010, when 46.3 million Americans were below the poverty line.
There are now 46.7 million people in poverty, of 14.8 percent of the nation. (The share has eased somewhat because the population has grown.)
Verdict: True.
Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton
Reality Check: Clinton, Sanders on Trump paying legal fees of man charged with assault
By Sonam Vashi, CNN
Both Clinton and Sanders addressed a recent incident at one of Donald Trump's rallies.
Hours after a Wednesday rally in North Carolina, videos surfaced of a man punching a black protester in the face at the rally and saying, "The next time we see him, we might have to kill him." Police arrested the alleged attacker, John McGraw, the following day and charged him with assault, disorderly conduct and communicating threats.
The protester was being escorted out of the rally by police officers, and the Columbus County Sheriff's Office is internally investigating whether the officers should have detained or arrested McGraw on the site, according to a spokesman.
At Sunday night's town hall, Sanders said, "Some of you may have read just a few hours ago that Mr. Trump said that he is prepared to pay for the legal costs of an individual who sucker punched somebody at a recent event. ... What that means is that Donald Trump is literally inciting violence with his supporters. He is saying that 'If you go out to beat somebody up, that is OK, I'll pay the legal fees.'"
Clinton later said, "Donald Trump is responsible for what happens at his events. He is the person who has for months now been not just inciting violence, but applauding violence. The images of the, you know, young African-American protester being attacked totally without any provocation whatsoever, and having Donald Trump say that he would pay the legal bills of the attacker."
In February, Trump spurred his fans to "knock the crap out of" people "getting ready to throw a tomato" at his rallies. "I promise you, I will pay for the legal fees. I promise, I promise," he said.
And Sunday morning on NBC's "Meet the Press," host Chuck Todd pressed Trump on whether he would help pay McGraw's legal fees. Trump said, "I've actually instructed my people to look into it, yes." Trump said he wants to see the full video of the incident and does not accept responsibility for it or "condone violence in any shape." He also said the protester was "sticking a certain finger up in the air, and that is a terrible thing to do in front of somebody that frankly wants to see America made great again."
Both statements from Sanders and Clinton are true.
http://www.kcra.com/politics/democratic-town-hall-a-reality-check/38498694
You said as much in post #245471.
My answers to your other questions are the same as yours would be.
My question for you - what are the things you like in TPP?
LOL... nothing funnier than reading chronic drivel from a pro TPP shill about the art of negotiating complex trade deals.
The tell is while she paraded her dog and pony around the world glorifying the TPP, Hillary never said, "'I hope' the it sets the gold standard in trade agreements."
So as Froman secretly works out the "complex details" with lobbyists, bankers, and other corporate lawyers/execs pushing the various agendas of Big Pharma, putting corporations ahead of sovereign nations and such -- her boss says, "Nothing to see here, Madam Secretary. Keep up the good work. You're doing a fine job for the American people."
Obama's Big Sellout: The President has Packed His Economic Team with Wall Street Insiders
Published on Sunday, December 13, 2009 by Rolling Stone
Barack Obama ran for president as a man of the people, standing up to Wall Street as the global economy melted down in that fateful fall of 2008. He pushed a tax plan to soak the rich, ripped NAFTA for hurting the middle class and tore into John McCain for supporting a bankruptcy bill that sided with wealthy bankers "at the expense of hardworking Americans." Obama may not have run to the left of Samuel Gompers or Cesar Chavez, but it's not like you saw him on the campaign trail flanked by bankers from Citigroup and Goldman Sachs. What inspired supporters who pushed him to his historic win was the sense that a genuine outsider was finally breaking into an exclusive club, that walls were being torn down, that things were, for lack of a better or more specific term, changing.
Then he got elected.
What's taken place in the year since Obama won the presidency has turned out to be one of the most dramatic political about-faces in our history. Elected in the midst of a crushing economic crisis brought on by a decade of orgiastic deregulation and unchecked greed, Obama had a clear mandate to rein in Wall Street and remake the entire structure of the American economy. What he did instead was ship even his most marginally progressive campaign advisers off to various bureaucratic Siberias, while packing the key economic positions in his White House with the very people who caused the crisis in the first place. This new team of bubble-fattened ex-bankers and laissez-faire intellectuals then proceeded to sell us all out, instituting a massive, trickle-up bailout and systematically gutting regulatory reform from the inside.
http://www.commondreams.org/news/2009/12/13/obamas-big-sellout-president-has-packed-his-economic-team-wall-street-insiders
For one example, he wasted a great chance to pull off real financial reform after the crisis, but instead surrounded himself with Wall Street execs and failed to deliver on his promise to stand up to them.
7 months hotshot... change your shirt and quit slobbering on yourself.
That does not discount the fact that Obama pulled the bait-and-switch on us in more ways than one. If it were any other pol, you probably wouldn't be surprised. Perhaps it's our fault, for thinking he was different.
As HRC pledges to support and continue the policies of Obama, one shouldn't overlook the many promises he declined to fulfill.
Univision's Jorge Ramos pointed out one such instance:
Patrick Reed please...
If his name hasn't rolled over yet, I'll go with Justin Thomas
Sorry, I lost track.
Thanks
Election 2016: Voters’ Concerns About U.S. Trade Policy Fueled Michigan Primary Election Results
In the lead-up to the Michigan primary, Hillary Clinton’s campaign appeared to sense that the issue of international trade could be a powerful force in the election. In a late February conference call with reporters, the Democrat's campaign deployed a congressman from a nearby industrial state to cast her opponent, Bernie Sanders, as not sufficiently supportive of protecting jobs. Clinton also sought to downplay her support for major trade deals, instead talking up her one vote in the Senate against a relatively small trade pact with Central American nations.
But Sanders' stunning upset victory in Michigan seemed to demonstrate that the tactics were not enough — and that Clinton’s past support for a raft of trade pacts could hurt her in other nearby states that have been similarly battered by job losses.
According to exit polls, 58 percent of those who voted in Michigan’s Democratic presidential primary said that trade with other countries takes away American jobs — and of those, 58 percent voted for Sanders. A similar trend emerged on the Republican side, where 55 percent of those who voted in Michigan’s Republican primary said trade with other countries reduces American jobs. Donald Trump — who has recently echoed Sanders’ career-long critique of America’s trade policies — won a plurality (45 percent) of those voters in a field of GOP candidates who have not matched his trade criticism.
The Democratic contest, though, was the arena where the trade policy debate was most pronounced. Sanders spotlighted Clinton's past comments that seemed to tout job outsourcing, and he pointed out that Clinton has been an outspoken supporter of most of the United States’ biggest free trade agreements. In the years leading up to her election to the senate, she publicly backed the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and Permanent Normal Trade Relations with China. Later, she initially opposed free trade agreements with Colombia and South Korea, but then State Department emails revealed that she went on to personally lobby to pass those pacts. She also repeatedly promoted the pending Trans-Pacific Partnership, which she only recently said she now opposes.
Over the last three decades, high-profile critics of such trade deals — from Sanders to Pat Buchanan to Ross Perot to now Trump — have argued that by reducing U.S. tariffs on goods from countries that have lower wage, labor, environmental and human rights standards, such trade deals would prompt manufacturers to move production facilities abroad in an effort to cut costs and boost profits. Those critics’ arguments have been buttressed by the export deficits that accompanied the trade agreements — deficits that have together resulted in the loss of roughly 4 million U.S. jobs, according to estimates from the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute.
That group notes that in addition to Michigan, some of the states that have been hardest hit by trade-related job losses include Ohio, Illinois, Indiana and Wisconsin. Those delegate-rich states are scheduled to soon hold primaries that could tip both parties’ presidential nominating contests.
Ohio’s upcoming primary may be the biggest test of whether Sanders and Trump’s trade critiques have electoral resonance beyond Michigan. One of the state’s U.S. senators, Sherrod Brown, is a liberal Democrat who has been able to win two terms in the swing state by forging a profile as one of Congress’s most ardent critics of free trade deals. Its other senator, Republican Rob Portman, had been a consistent supporter of such deals but recently announced his opposition to the TPP — a move that seemed to confirm the growing political power of the trade criticism.
Heading into the state’s March 15 election, the Republican contest appears to be a close fight — meaning trade could tip the balance. Polls show that despite being the state’s governor, John Kasich is trailing Trump . Kasich had been a steadfast supporter of trade deals such as NAFTA, but has recently tried to adjust his campaign rhetoric to match Trump’s trade criticism.
On the Democratic side, two of the state’s congressional representatives appeared to differ on the significance of the candidates’ past record on trade deals.
In February, Ohio Democratic Rep. Marcy Kaptur — who represents Toledo — suggested that Sanders’ unwavering opposition to free trade agreements would appeal to her state’s voters.
“First time in my career that I’ve heard a candidate give voice to what we’ve been struggling for and against in this Congress for the last quarter century,” she told the Boston Globe. “Senator Sanders has always been there. He has never been a ‘Johnny-Come-Lately’ and he has never changed positions.”
She contrasted that with Clinton by adding: “I must say that when Secretary Clinton was secretary of state, I don’t recall her ever attempting to balance [free-trade agreements] or change them in any way.” The Globe reported that “Kaptur said Clinton had belatedly come to oppose the Trans-Pacific Partnership, noting, ‘Senator Sanders was there from the very beginning.’”
A few weeks later, the Clinton campaign organized a conference call for reporters with Ohio Democratic Rep. Tim Ryan, a critic of trade deals who represents Youngstown. During the call, Ryan dismissed Sanders' opposition to free trade agreements, arguing the Vermont lawmaker “doesn’t have a history of manufacturing” and asserting that “he’s been MIA.” He also suggested that what’s more important than Clinton’s past support for trade deals that may have hurt the industrial Midwest is where the former Secretary of State now says she stands on those issues.
“There were a lot of people that go back and forth on some of these trade agreements but what I want is someone who is going to look at them as they are written, as they are negotiated, like she has done with TPP and basically said if this is not going to create jobs, if this is not going increase wages, if this is not going to protect our national security then she is not going to support them,” he said. “We need to focus on what’s happening now and what’s going to happen in the future and I’m very secure with the fact that she is going to be with us on these key issues.”
By David Sirota 03/09/16 AT 5:44 AM
http://www.ibtimes.com/political-capital/election-2016-voters-concerns-about-us-trade-policy-fueled-michigan-primary
Typical comeback towards anyone who does not agree with your opinion or politics.
Not a problem F6. That infantile response speaks for itself.
Not so. Warren's $5,000 PAC is a laughably insignificant argument relating to Clinton's Super PAC. And $606,750 in individual donations didn't necessarily reflect the essence Wall Street influence on her campaign.
You correctly pointed out that Wall Street was Warren's 6th largest contributor in her senate bid, but notice that Hillary's largest contributor is Wall Street.
One thing is undeniable...
Elizabeth Warren's silence is powerful.
I assume you are talking about a letter Barbara Boxer wrote and passed around for signatures more than 2 years ago. A lot of water has passed by the bridge since then.
Whether or not it falls on an issue of trust, there is a reason why Warren hasn't formally endorsed Hillary.
You'll need a lot more crumbs to build a case that Warren was on par with Clinton in receiving campaign money.
Warren trusts Hillary... Really?
she accepted Wall St money during her Senate run
I hope you have a link. I couldn't find any "Wall St" contributions thrown her way on OpenSecrets.org. Of course there was some insinuations from the usual suspects in the National Review, American Crossroads and Breitbart... maybe my googling is off... tia
Bernie rails against a rigged economy and a corrupt campaign finance system. How can anybody in their right mind not welcome that?
by my calculations, Scott would move up from 9th to 6th with a win.
Rory would move to 2nd with a win.